Interview mit David Graeber, Autor von "Schulden - Die ersten 5000 Jahre".

A useful antidote (or merely counterpoint?) to the whole Graeber-related nastiness on Crooked Timber a while ago. Similar kind of situation, similar Niceness Police (as Kotsko would put it) showing up in the comments, but still a much more constructive outcome. Eager to read the final follow-up post. [Update-- here: http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/04/26/different_worlds_a_last_dhfr_paper_thought.php ] Seriously, guys, this is what the future of scientific publishing and peer review looks like.

A weirdly ranty response; it takes a special kind of effort to read "I think this is an important work, and I'm going to teach it in my classes" as an effort to "de-legitimize" a book. See also Rossman's comment below, and the (tangential) connections (through his blog, and through the other commenters) to the Mineshaft. Just... very strange all around.

„Löscht alle Schulden, und verteilt das Land neu!“ - das, so hat der große Althistoriker Moses Finley geschrieben, sei über Jahrhunderte das einzige und immer wiederkehrende revolutionäre Programm der Antike gewesen

Schulden sind im Kern ein moralisches Prinzip und eine moralische Waffe

Noch heute glauben wir, es habe erst den Tauschhandel gegeben, der dann, aus Gründen der Bequemlichkeit, von Geld abgelöst worden ist. Dafür, so Graeber, gibt es keine einzige Quelle. Tatsächlich beginnt die Geschichte der menschlichen Ökonomie mit Krediten und ohne Geld. Jemand verspricht die Ware, die er erwirbt, später auf irgendeine Weise zu begleichen.

Der amerikanische Ökonom Michael Hudson, dessen Studien Graeber viel zu verdanken hat, hält die Occupy-Bewegung in den Vereinigten Staaten für prärevolutionär. Ihren wirklichen Ausbruch erwartet er für das Frühjahr 2012.

Das erste Wort für Freiheit in menschlicher Sprache überhaupt, ist das sumerische „amargi", ein Wort für Schuldenfreiheit.

"At this point, it’s easier to understand why economists feel so defensive about challenges to the Myth of Barter, and why they keep telling the same old story even though most of them know it isn’t true. If what they are really describing is not how we ‘naturally’ behave but rather how we are taught to behave by the market—well who, nowadays, is doing most of the actual teaching? Primarily, economists. The question of barter cuts to the heart of not only what an economy is—most economists still insist that an economy is essentially a vast barter system, with money a mere tool (a position all the more peculiar now that the majority of economic transactions in the world have come to consist of playing around with money in one form or another) [10]—but also, the very status of economics: is it a science that describes of how humans actually behave, or prescriptive, a way of informing them how they should? (Remember, sciences generate hypothesis about the world that can be tested against the evidence and changed or abandoned if they don’t prove to predict what’s empirically there.)

Or is economics instead a technique of operating within a world that economists themselves have largely created? Or is it, as it appears for so many of the Austrians, a kind of faith, a revealed Truth embodied in the words of great prophets (such as Von Mises) who must, by definition be correct, and whose theories must be defended whatever empirical reality throws at them—even to the extent of generating imaginary unknown periods of history where something like what was originally described ‘must have’ taken place?"